About Colum

Short bio

Colum McCann is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honours, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family.

Extended Bio

Colum McCann is the award-winning author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. His most recent novel, Apeirogon (to be published in February 2020) has already received several rave advance reviews, including starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist.

“Let the Great World Spin” was published in 2009 and won worldwide acclaim, including The 2009 National Book Award in the U.S, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, the International Impac Award 2011, a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several other major international literary prizes.

Let the Great World Spin became a best-seller on four continents. His novel TransAtlantic was also an international sensation and became an immediate New York Times best-seller on its release in 2013. It too garnered several international awards including the Mondello Citta de Palermo Prize in Italy.

McCann’s fiction has been published in over 40 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Tin House, Bomb and several other places. He has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, the Guardian, the Times and the Independent.

McCann is considered, in every sense, an international artist. Born in Ireland, he has travelled extensively around the world. He and his wife Allison lived in Japan for eighteen months. He currently lives in New York City, where he holds dual Irish and American citizenship. He is a member of the Irish Academy, Aosdana, and was awarded a Chevalier des arts et lettres by the French government in fall 2009 (making him one of a exclusive number of foreign artists recognised in France for their literary contributions: other recipients have included Salman Rushdie, Phillip Gourevitch and Julian Barnes).

In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The territory of McCann’s work is international in scope and geography – his topics have ranged from homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York, to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the effects of 9/11, to a poetic examination of the life and culture of the Roma in Europe. He is known as a writer of style and substance, hailed by critics and readers alike. Among his major influences are Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Don DeLillo, E.L Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien and the Irish novelist Benedict Kiely. McCann is known a “poetic realist” and a “literary risk-taker,” a writer who is known to tackle the dark in order to get through to the light – “any sort of light, however compromised” – on the far side.

McCann is very active in New York and Irish-based charities – in particular organizations such as the global charity Narrative 4 (narrative4.com) which he co-founded with Lisa Consiglio in June 2013, along with several other founding artists. He is also involved with the Irish Arts Centre, The Irish Repertory Theatre, Origin Theater, PEN, the New York Public Library, Art for Amnesty, the Norman Mailer Colony, and Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words.

“Let the Great World Spin” received unprecedented international recognition on its release in 2009. McCann was awarded the Deauville Festival Literary Prize; the Ambassador Award; the inaugural Medici Book Club prize; Amazon.Com’s “Book of the Year,” 2010; the 2010 NAIBA “Book of the Year,” given by independent book-sellers, and he was the overall winner of the Grinzane Award in Italy. The book was short-listed for several other awards including Irish Novel of the Year. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The film rights for “Let the Great World Spin” were bought by J.J Abrams, the highly acclaimed director and creator of “Lost.” McCann is currently adapting the screenplay along with Abrams. It is not McCann’s first foray into film — his short film “Everything in this Country Must,” directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar in 2005.

In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine’s Writer of the Year for their “Best and Brightest” issue. Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award for Irish Literature, the Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year 2003, and the inaugural 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award.

“I believe in the democracy of story-telling,” said McCann in an interview. “I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries. I feel humbled by the notion that I’m even a small part of the literary experience. I grew up in a house, in a city, in a country shaped by books. I don’t know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They’re the only thing we have that can trump life itself.”

McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. In the early 1980’s he took a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Allison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.

McCann teaches in Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht. The program is considered one of the finest in the country: only six students are accepted each year. Students who have graduated from the program include National Book Award Winner Phil Klay, Jessica Soffer, Scott Cheshire, Bill Cheng, Vanessa Manko, Jason Porter, Lauren Holmes, Gabriel Packard, Alex Gilvarry, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Victoria Brown, Sunil Yapa and several others who have launched successful literary careers.

He is the co-founder of Narrative 4, a global non-profit (narrative4.com). Led by artists, educators, students and community activists (including Lisa Consiglio, Terry Tempest Williams, Ishmael Beah, Rob Spillman, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Greg Khalil, Assaf Gavron, Tyler Cabot, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Sting and several others), Narrative 4 brings young people together from all over the world to “walk in one another’s shoes.” “It’s an act of radical empathy,” says McCann. “You tell my story and I’ll tell yours. We’ve had incredible results from all over the world. From Newtown, Connecticut to Belfast to Kentucky to Tampico, Mexico. From gang-land kids in Chicago to the streets of Limerick. What story-telling does is that it increases the lungs of the world. After the exchanges, these young people go back into their communities and begin to alter their worlds from the ground up. We’re looking to develop a generation of truly empathetic leaders.”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking” was published in October 2015. It consists of a novella and three short stories. Esquire magazine published the short story “Treaty” in its summer fiction issue. The short story “Sh’khol” was published in Zoetrope and has already been awarded a Pushcart Prize and was selected for Best American Short Stories 2015.

Apeirogon

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Video Trailer for Apeirogon

This is the first in a series of short videos where Colum McCann talks about his new novel, Apeirogon. “A work of incredible magnitude . . . McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope. Apeirogon is greater…

Welcome to the Newsletter

The good folks at Random House asked me to do an occasional newsletter in the run-up to my new novel, APEIROGON (coming Feb 25, 2020), a glimpse behind the curtain, a step behind the pages, to give a little glance into my world.

Praise for Apeirogon

“Every significant novel is an act of reckless originality. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is nothing like any book you’ve ever read. Think of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, or George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo for the first time. Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it’s capable of containing, has been expanded, forever.”—Michael Cunningham, New York Times bestselling author of The Snow Queen

Apeirogon Tour

Apeirogon goes on sale on Feb 25th and tour dates in February and March will include New York, Boston, Portland Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Mississippi, Ann Arbor Michigan, San Diego, Montclaire New Jersey and more! Also Ireland and England, followed by Australia in May!! Also Edinburgh in August!

Patriots of Elsewhere

The following speech was written and delivered by Colum McCann on the occasion of the PEN/Song Lyrics Award in Boston in September 2016, given to Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits.

TODAY is a day when literature salutes song and its writers. So, come song: lend me eloquence…

Punched and knocked unconscious after trying to help a woman who had also been assaulted along a busy city street.

National Book Award Interview

Interview conducted by Bret Anthony Johnston. Bret Anthony Johnston: First, congratulations on Let the Great World Spin being named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction! Do you recall the inception of the book? Was there any image or incident or memory that triggered the writing process? Colum McCann: Thanks so much. One only has to…

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award (IrishCentral)

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award

WTC Provides Back Story For Colum McCann’s ‘Spin’

“What I was most interested in was not so much Philip Petit but the people who were on the ground, the people who walk the sort-of little tightrope of our ordinary everyday moments,” McCann says. The reactions of McCann’s main characters to the stunt range from gripping fear that the tight-rope walker will fall, to…

“McCann joins ranks of the great” (Irish Times)

For Colum McCann, the Dublin-born, New York-based writer whose ‘ Let the Great World Spin’ won the US National Book Award on Wednesday night, the prestigious accolade helped make up for Ireland’s defeat to France – just about, he tells FIONA McCANN